As per the report, the financial viability for public charging stations in India continues to be low, with current utilisation rates of less than 2 per cent
India would require capital expenditure of up to Rs 16,000 crore to meet its public charging demand for electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030, according to a report released by industry body FICCI. The report analyses data collected from 40 cities (prioritised out of a total of over 700 cities) based on EV sales from 2015 to 2023-324, and proposes to focus on 20 highway stretches for scaling up public charging infrastructure.
The top 40 priority cities, including Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad, Chennai, Kochi, Trivandrum, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Surat, Bengaluru and Pune (among others), are expected to have higher EV penetration in the next 3-5 years given the current EV adoption rate, and favorable state policies, stated the report.
As per the report, the financial viability for public charging stations in India continues to be low, with current utilisation rates of less than 2 per cent. To achieve profitability and scalability, India should be aiming to achieve utilization rates of 8-10 per cent by 2030, it added.
The report also highlighted how Germany has managed to create an economically viable public charging network with 5-10 per cent utilisation rates, and more than 16 per cent utilisation rates at the highways.
In order to achieve the desired utilisation rates, the report suggests that players would have to collaborate with local authorities for hyper-granular planning to identify hot spots for setting up public charging stations.
The FICCI report also highlights the key challenges that would have to be addressed to scale up charging infrastructure. These include financial constraints such as high infrastructure costs and low utilisation rates, and operational constraints such as the lack of uninterrupted power supply and lack of standardized protocols to enable interoperability.
Among the proposed measures was the standardisation of GST rates (from 18 per cent to 5 precent) for EV charging services in line with taxation across the EV value chain.
The report also states that implementing the latest EV charging guidelines issued by the Ministry of Power and operating models like cost sharing agreements between charge point operators (CPOs) and businesses could help break even at lower utilisation rates. States like Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and Gujarat have either low fixed tariffs or none, but there are other states where fixed tariffs are high, thereby challenging the viability, it said.
The report calls for actions across key stakeholders including policy makers, industry players and government bodies to enable India’s transition towards clean energy and sustainability. It also emphasised on the need for states to comply to the recent EV guidelines issued by the Ministry of Power, recommending a uniform charging framework. States could also set up state-level cells with representatives from industry stakeholders, state and central authorities to enable and monitor charging infrastructure roadmap implementation, said the report.